Archive for the Compositions Category

Wedding Decorations

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David and I love to photograph weddings. One of the key point to successful wedding photography is the attention to detail. The couple (family) wants to remember key details of their most precious moments. The chances of missing “the moment” is significantly less when photographers work as a team. If you are planning to get married this year and need a photographer, please consider us. If time permits, we are willing to fly around the country. Email us: eye2eyephotostudio@ymail.com.

Enjoy the image and have a great day!

Fashion Shot

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I purposely did not frame this image. This is not a portrait either even if it shows a beautiful young lady. It is a product shot. The main difference between a product shot and a portrait is that the portrait is a reflection of the personality of a human being. Everything in the composition to show the person. In a fashion shot the main focus is on the product. The composition needs to send a message: Buy this product and you will look as beautiful as this young lady.

Enjoy the image and think about the purpose of your image!

Photographing Fear

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Creating images that bring out fear, joy sadness compassion etc. out of the viewer are always a great challenge. I wanted to create an image that creates feelings of fear. I borrowed this old Turkish knife and put my camera of a tripod. I set the camera on manual focus and pre-focused the distance. I used f13 to give a good depth of field, 0,5 sec. expose time to capture the motion @ ISO 400. I used two umbrellas with permanent lights to create the reflection on the knife. The I took the first test shots to get the right angle for the reflection of the light on the knife. It took a little bit of patients and a number of try shots to get this image. The trick was to overexpose a little bit, hold the knife still in the final position and move the knife backwards during the exposure time to get the reflection of the light into the camera. During the post-production process I duplicated the image and inverted the second layer. Then I “played” a little bit in Photoshop to get the desired effect.

Enjoy the image and start experimenting!

Tulips and a girl

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When I photograph a person I always think: Who is that person, what does he/she like? In what context does he/she thrive. In this image I wanted to show the relationship between this young lady and the tulips. Her eyes, her hair and the position of her legs establish a relationship with the flower.

Enjoy!

Paper flower

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This is an other image of my “throw away” mail. To me it almost looks like a flower (with some imagination). Camera setting: f8, 1/20sec., ISO 100.

Enjoy and have a great photographic day!

Throw-away paper

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Today was not a great day to go out and photograph. It was wet and yucky therefore I decided to look for a subject in my room. When I looked at my paper shredder I saw a bunch of old mail and envelopes that needed to be destroyed. I decided to photograph them. I used several arrangement until I achieved the composition I liked. The red dot is the focal point and the lines that are created by the white paper support the overall structure of the image. I used mostly side and back lightning to create the shadows that I wanted. The shallow depth of field is another tool to draw attention to the main focal point. I used my 85mm portrait lens with a 12mm extender. Camera setting: f2.8, 1/50.sec., ISO 100.

Enjoy and be creative with your photography. You find a subject anywhere!

Reflection at Avila Beach

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I shot this image at Avila Beach. In the window you see the reflection of the pier which caught my eye while I was standing in the parking lot of the beach. The light was perfect at the “Golden Hour” and still I was debating with myself if I should either radically edit this image in post production or delete it altogether. The reason is twofold: First, I like a clear subject in an image. In this image my eyes are wandering around. The cropped the number sign off at least a little bit but as always letters and numbers draw attention. In addition the palm tree is blocking partially the view and there are two small shadow points in the lower left. These spots fight for your attention and it seems to me that they draw away from the reflection. Second: To contradict this pulling away energy, I cropped the window frame as tight as possible. This creates a feeling of being cramped. Still, I like the image. Camera setting: focal length 370mm, f16, 1/250sec., ISO 100.

Enjoy and happy photographing!

Merced downtown

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It can be a challenge to combine several different light sources in one image. There are four different light sources in this images. There is the strong warm light in the front, the candle light in the window, the lamps in the restaurant and the cold neon light in the back. In this image the cold neon and the warm lights form a nice contrast and make this image work.

Enjoy and “think before you shoot” (quote from one of my favorite photographers, Martin Munkacsi).

Back Door Entrance

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Night Photography has it’s own challenges and rewards. Many times I struggle with blown out highlights from lamps and too dark shadows. Adobe Lightroom (the new Adobe Lightroom beta version can be downloaded for free and used until the final version will ship in Spring of 2010) offers a wonderful masking tool which allow editing local areas. In the raw file it looked like that the light source completely blew out the entire area above the door. With Lightroom I was able to bring back quite a lot of structure and still give the impression of a strong light above the door.

Enjoy this image and have a wonderful week.

A Playground for your Camera

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On my morning exercise walk I pass by a playground. This week I decided to photograph it. The focus of my attention became quickly line, shapes and contrast. I discovered that a play ground is a great “playground” for composition techniques.

Enjoy and play with you camera on a playground!